Chapter 2 Chapter One

The bell rang loudly.Harsh, passionate, maddening. There was a sudden noise in the silent corridor, which made the peace of the morning seem abrupt.The noise escaped from the wide-open windows on all four sides of the small atrium, and flowed into the silent garden, where the gray grass was still wet with dew. The young Miss Ping got up, first opened a cloudy gray eye, and stretched out her hand to find her watch.Without the watch, she opened the other eye.The bedside table didn't seem to be there either, it wasn't there, of course it wasn't there, and I finally remembered. She knew last night that there was no bedside table, so she had to put the watch under the pillow.She groped awkwardly.Goodness! That bell makes such an annoying noise! ​​Really.There seems to be no watch under the pillow, but it should be there.She picked up the pillow and saw only a small blue and white linen handkerchief.So she dropped the pillow and looked carefully at the gap between the bed and the wall.That's right, there's a little thing that looks like a watch.She lay flat on the bed, with one arm outstretched just enough to touch the watch.Miss Ping carefully clamped the watch with her thumb and forefinger.If you accidentally drop it again, you have to get up and crawl under the bed to find it.She breathed a sigh of relief, turned over, and proudly picked up the watch.

The watch pointed to half past five. Half past five! Miss Ping stopped breathing suddenly, her eyes widened in surprise.No, it's impossible, no matter how much you focus on physical training and running schools, no school will start classes at 5:30 in the morning! Headlights? But, half past five! She pressed her watch to her little pink ear.Tick ​​tick walked seriously.Leaning across the pillow, she squinted to see the garden through the window behind the bed. Yo! it's so early, the world looks like it's early morning when everything wakes up. When Handa stood at the door like a king in the world last night, she said: "Honey, sleep well. The students really enjoyed listening to your speech. See you tomorrow morning."

No mention of the five-thirty bell at all. Well! Thank goodness it wasn't her funeral.She used to live by the bell, too, but that was a long time ago.Now, only when she presses the bell button with her slender fingers that have been carefully groomed, will the bell ring in Miss Ping's life.As the clamor faded into staccato whimpers and into silence, she turned to face the wall and buried her head in the pillow, blissfully.Not her funeral.The grass is glistening with dew, and it's all for these young boys, for these glorious youthful years, let them enjoy themselves! And she needs two more hours of sleep.

Miss Ping looks as innocent as a child, with a pink round face, a small nose, and a head of brown hair fixed by a small hairpin that is invisible on the surface.Just because of these curly hair, she fought for a long time last night. She was exhausted enough from the train journey, the meeting with Handa, and then the speech; she thought feebly that she might be leaving here after lunch the next day, having just been burned two months ago. If you don't curl your hair for a day, it shouldn't be a problem.However, on the one hand, she wanted to fight against her fragile side, and on the other hand, she wanted to make Handa look good. She actually put on fourteen hairpins, so that these hairpins could perform their duties well at night.She reminded herself of the need to protect her strong will (which offset the sting of conscience she'd felt over self-indulgence earlier in the morning), and marveled at the notion that she couldn't let Handa down.At school back then, when she was timid and immature in the fourth grade, she had already deeply admired Handa, who was the class representative of the sixth grade.Handa was born to excel, and her gift lies in knowing how to supervise others to develop their strengths.After leaving the school, although she received training as a secretary in administration, her talent allowed her to become the dean of this sports academy without knowing anything about physical education.Before Miss Ping started writing her book, Handa had long forgotten who Lucy Ping was, just as Lucy had forgotten who Handa was.

That was exactly what Lucy herself thought.her book. Her surprise at writing the book is still unabated.Her mission in life turned out to be to teach French to schoolgirls.Four years after her parents passed away one after another, Lucy, who could receive an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds a year, wiped away her tears with one hand and handed in her resignation letter to the school with the other hand.The jealous principal pointed out sharply to Lucy that smart investments should be diversified. For a well-educated and status-like person like Lucy, an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds is really not enough to live on .Lucy still insisted on resigning, and rented a decent apartment near Regent Park, far away from Camden Town.When the bills were due, she sat comfortably with the money she earned from teaching French occasionally, and spent all the rest of her spare time reading psychology books.

She started reading her first psychology books out of curiosity, purely because it was interesting.To go on and read other psychology books is to wonder if they are all the same, and there is no wisdom at all. When she read the thirty-seventh book of the same type, Miss Ping developed a school of psychology of her own.Of course, her theory is completely different from the thirty-seven books I have read so far.In fact, those thirty-seven books were so stupid that at the end she sat down angrily and began to write rebuttals.Since psychological works must use technical terms, and most of these terms are not in English, these refutations are written out, which is even more learned and profound.However, if Miss Ping hadn't written a short letter on the back of a scrapped draft (her typing skills are really unflattering), no one would be impressed with these manuscripts.

The note read: Dear Mr. Stalla, I would be very grateful if you would not use your radio after eleven o'clock in the evening.It bothers me a lot when you use it at night. Lucy Ping would like to invite Mr. Stara, whom Lucy had never met (only saw his name written on the downstairs door plate), to visit in person that night.Mr. Stara held the open short card in his hand, which made Lucy feel that he was intimidating, and he took several breaths before he could make a sound.But Mr. Stara didn't get angry at all about the radio. He seemed to be a reviewer of a publishing house, and he showed great interest in the manuscript on the back of the letter paper that Miss Ping inadvertently used as a short letter.

Normally, when someone proposes a book on psychology, the publisher rings the bell for brandy, so that it can be done in the long run.But just one year ago, the British people suddenly became bored with novels, and turned to esoteric themes, such as how far Sirius is from the earth, or the connotation of a tribe’s primitive dance, etc. This change is profound. The publishing world was deeply shaken.Therefore, publishers are all trying their best to find new topics to satisfy readers' thirst for knowledge.Miss Ping fell into the welcome arms of the publisher at the right time.As a result, the senior partner of the publishing house invited Ms. Ping to lunch and signed a contract.It's not just luck, the Almighty Creator has fed up not only the British with fiction, but also the intellectuals with the teachings of Freud's gang.What they are looking for is new thinking.Lucy stands out.When Lucy woke up one morning, she found that not only was she famous, but her book was a hit.Shocked, Lucy walked out of the house, gulped down three cups of black coffee, and sat in the park all morning with staring eyes.

By the time she got the letter from Handa, her book had been on the bestseller list, and had been for months.And Lucy is also used to being invited to various societies to talk about her unique views.In the letter, Handa mentioned the good times they shared when they were both students, and invited Lucy to stay for a while and give a speech to the students.Lucy was actually tired of the speeches, and was no longer impressed with Handa.She was about to write a letter to decline, but she remembered that one day in the fourth grade, her classmates discovered the shame of her life that she tried so hard to hide: her baptismal name - Leticia.By then the fourth graders were quite detached, and the question Lucy struggled with was whether her mother would mind if she committed suicide.Even so, her mother did it to herself, who let her choose an exaggerated name for her daughter! Handa used her joking words and words to resolve the incident into a comic drama.The name Leticia was never mentioned again, Lucy was able to give up the idea of ​​drowning herself, and after school she was overwhelmed with gratitude.So when she wrote, she wrote that she was willing to spend the night at Handa's school (thankfully, her gratitude didn't completely overshadow her innate prudence), and that she would be more than happy to lecture on psychology to students.

Lucy thought that everything was still pleasant, and erected a stack of lecture notes high to block the glare of the day.She had never had such a quiet good listener.Rows of shiny heads decorated the empty lecture hall like a garden, not to mention accompanied by eager applause.After listening to the polite applause in various societies for several weeks, such enthusiastic high-fives are like the sound of nature. Besides, the questions raised by the students are also quite standard.Although the schedule of the lecture hall clearly stated that the topic of the lecture was psychology, Lucy didn't expect many people to really appreciate the lecture. She originally thought that the group of young women were just muscular.But then again, there are always a few people who ask the question, so others may be simple-minded.

Forget it, tonight, she can lie in her sweet blanket, and other things will become a thing of the past.Handa originally advised her to stay for a few more days, but for a while, her will wavered slightly.Dinner changed her mind.Boiled beans and milk pudding on a summer evening is, yes, plentiful and nutritious, but not refreshing.I definitely don't want to eat it again.Handa also said that the dishes on the teacher's table are the same as those on the students' table.Lucy secretly hoped that Handa didn't say this because she saw her doubtful eyes on boiled beans.In fact, Lucy tried to look at the plate of boiled beans in a cheerful way, maybe her performance didn't work out! "Thomas! Little-soup! Desperate!" Miss Ping suddenly woke up.This desperate voice seemed to be in her room.Only then did she discover that the second window of the room was facing the courtyard; because the courtyard was quite small, the conversations between rooms could naturally be heard clearly through the window.She lay down, trying to soothe her beating heart, and looked out over the sheets piled behind her toes at the window framing a view of the wall opposite.Her bed is placed in the corner of the room, there is a window behind the wall on the right, and the window facing the courtyard is behind the foot of her left bed. She lies on the pillow and looks out through the long strip-shaped gap, only seeing A half open window at the other end of the courtyard. "Little-soup! Little-soup!" Miss Ping saw a black head. The black head made a sound: "For God's sake, someone hurry up and find something to wake Thomas up, so that Dexter won't make any more noise." "Dear Gai Linqi, you are such an unreasonable beast. I tore my garter and don't know what to do. Xiaotang borrowed my only safety pin to attend the garden party yesterday, and used it as a picking needle. She just Be sure to give it back to me—Thomas! Oh, Tom!" A new, lower-pitched voice joins: "Hey! You can keep your voice down, please." Then there is silence. Lucy felt in the silence, as if they were communicating with gestures. The black-headed melon asked: "What do you mean by a bunch of signals?" "Shut up, there she is!" came the deep, desperate bass. "Who is she? " "A woman surnamed Ping." "Honey, what the hell are you talking about," said Dexter's high clear voice again, happily addressing the other person as "Honey." "She lives in the front hall like all the other almighty master teachers. You Thought, if I asked, would she happen to have a spare safety pin to lend me?" "In my opinion, she is more of a zipper lover." Another new voice appeared. "Quiet me! Tell you, she lives in Bantley's room!" It was really quiet now.Lucy saw the black head turn sharply towards her window. Someone asked: "How do you know?" "Joe Li said it when she brought me a midnight snack last night." Lucy remembered that Miss Joliver was the housekeeper, and thought that the nickname Jo Li made this harsh person more human. "Jesus!" said the voice that had mentioned "zipper" earlier, excitedly. A bell rang through the silence.It was as harsh as the bell that had woken them up earlier.The black-headed melon disappeared when the bell rang for the first time, and Dax's voice was weeping desperately amidst the noise.The trivialities of everyday life began to appear, and this trivial social scandal abdicated.Waves of voices rose up, echoing the ringtone.The door was banging, the corridor was full of footsteps, and shouting was everywhere. Some people thought that Thomas was still sleeping, and since throwing things from nearby windows failed to wake her up, they slammed into the room. There was a slam on her locked door, and then, from the other side of the atrium grass, there was the sound of kicking, treading, and running on the gravel.Gradually, more and more footsteps stepped on the gravel walkway, the stairwell became quieter and quieter, and the chattering noise climbed to the highest point and then faded away.When all the sounds receded with distance or all moved into the classroom), the last pair of feet were heard darting across the gravel walk, accompanied by a voice: "Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn— "Curse one step at a time.Undoubtedly, it was the late Thomas. Miss Ping deeply sympathized with this Thomas who had never met.Yes, the quilt is the most charming, but if you are so sleepy that you can't even be moved by the loud bell or the laments of your classmates, getting up must be a painful torture.Possibly Welsh.Everyone named Thomas is Welsh.The Celts hate getting out of bed the most.Poor Thomas, so, so, so poor.She really wanted to find a job for Thomas that would allow her to stay up after noon. Drowsiness began to attack her again, sinking her deeper and deeper.She didn't know whether "zipper lovers" was a compliment or a pejorative. At least the one with the safety pin, not the most admired, so, maybe—she fell asleep.